Welcome to the fourth issue of the OpenAFS newsletter. This newsletter summarizes what is happening in the OpenAFS community.

As always, volunteers, patches, bug reports, or any other type of help is greatly appreciated.

Feedback on this newsletter is welcome. The goal is to summarize the various development efforts and news of OpenAFS for the community. Please let Jason Edgecombe <jason@rampaginggeek.com> know what you would like to see out of this newsletter. Any news about AFS-related projects is welcome and may be submitted to Jason for inclusion in the next newsletter.

(On a personal note, I received thanks from the Elders and other folks for my work on this newsletter. I would like to say "thanks for the recognition, and I couldn't do it without the project leaders who put up with me bugging them for monthly status updates. ;)" --Jason)

For people following the progress of OpenAFS development, you've no doubt noticed a lot of changes. For those who haven't, the third great movement forward is upon us (the first happened with the open-sourcing of AFS; the second, when the Windows client was again adopted and development moved forward). A number of small new features have become available, but more importantly, thanks to a large number of fixes to compile-time warnings throughout the codebase, a number of bugs, many longstanding, have been uncovered and corrected.

We've also received contributions of code for GUI tools for MacOS, both an installer plugin for client configuration, and a preferences pane; the process of restructuring code to allow the Unix client cache manager to manage data not served by traditional Rx fileservers has begun; Finally, new supporting code for other planned enhancements, including the MCAS library as needed for extended callback support, have been incorporated.

At the same time, effort has again begun to be expended in the direction of creating a stable 1.6 release candidate. 1.5.61 was released on August 5. Bug reports, especially bug reports for servers, are requested to help us with this effort.

The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh will be hosting an AFS Hackathon 22-24 September (immediately before the European AFS Conference). All OpenAFS developers are welcome to attend - please see the email to openafs-announce for details, and RSVP to sxw@inf.ed.ac.uk

The University Roma Tre will host the 2009 European AFS Meeting from September 28-30. The European workshop is mainly a platform for system administrators to exchange their knowledge and report use cases. Topics of interest include related technologies like Kerberos or LDAP and all supported operating systems.

People who were instrumental in the conversion to git include Michael Meffie, Max Cohan, Simon Wilkinson, Derrick Brashear, and the git developer community, especially Shawn Pearce and Johannes Schindlein. The Git conversion is a major change. Gerrit has been operational for slightly over a week, and already 80 changes were submitted. Most changes are going in within a couple of days. This is a clearing of backlog from things that people already had in their personal repositories, but still, it's clear that the new tools will make a huge difference.

The CVS repository for the openafs web site has been converted to git and connected to Gerrit. Web site changes may be submitted to Gerrit and can be approved just like source code contributions. A different authentication group for web site approvals was created in Gerrit.

The developers of the RxOSD branch have started to work on a protocol draft for the OSD-extension. Their progress can be watched at http://pfanne.rzg.mpg.de/trac/openAFS-OSD/wiki/SpecDraft. Any comments are welcome. A series of patches has already been submitted to gerrit, and some of the code is part of the OpenAFS development branch already. --Christof

I have begun submitting XCB code upstream. The current status is that Libosi and MCAS dependencies are submitted. MCAS has 2 parts, the first of which (base contribution) has been committed, and the second part I would expect to be committed some time this week. Libosi needs to be broken up and re-sent to gerrit--this should happen by end-of-week. Finally, the latest XCB implementation, implementing draft 10, should be submitted for review by 8/10/2009.

There has not been major new documentation work since the last newsletter, but we've been doing some work behind the scenes that should eventually make it easier to manage and update the OpenAFS web site. With the advent of Gerrit, we will also be emphasizing updating the documentation at the same time as the code for new user-visible features. --Russ